C++ Development Environments

Compilers

You may do your programming work for this course with any C++ compiler and development environment you wish, but your submitted homework code must compile and run on gcc/g++ 4.6.3. We understand that some of you may choose to use another compiler and development environment (e.g., Microsoft Visual Studio) for most of your work. We are asking you to write portable code (for g++/gcc) because it is good programming practice and it allows us to significantly streamline the grading process for your TAs. This leaves more time for us to give constructive feedback on programming style, individual tutoring, and debugging help.

The good news is that the gcc/g++ compiler is available for every operating system, and you have a variety of different options for development environments. Note: Slightly different gcc compiler version numbers are ok. You will probably not notice any differences. (Be sure to do a practice submit of your homework early enough each week to allow time to correct compilation issues.)

We also recommend the clang/LLVM compiler, which has earned much praise for having clear and concise compiler error messages that are especially helpful for new C++ programmers. Once setup on your system, you simply substitute "clang++" for "g++" when you compile your program. However, because clang is still under heavy development, it is somewhat less stable and portable to all operating systems and hardware. Thus we will still primarily use g++ for grading on the homework server.

Cygwin

If you are using the RCS default installation of the Windows operating system, you should already have Cygwin. What is it? It's a UNIX environment for the Windows Operating System. You can do all of your work for this class using Cygwin, g++, and a text editor such as Emacs (in other words, you don't need to use Visual Studio). Read more about Cygwin here:

Note: The default installation of Cygwin from RCS does not include all of the packages you will use this semester. If you are missing some packages, re-run the setup-x86.exe installer, and install g++ and zip:

To do this, search for "g++", click to expand "devel", and then select to install the the "mingw-gcc-g++ GNU collection compiler" and the "gcc-g++ GNU compiler collection".
Next search for "zip", expand "archive", and select to install the "zip: Info-ZIP compression utility".

Upgrading is much faster than the original installation.

Plaintext & Code Viewers/Editors

Many different text/code editors are available for all of the different operating systems. You'll want to pick an helpful editor that color-highlights your code and helps with indentation. Also note that use and display of "newlines" in plaintext files is not standardized on UNIX/linux platforms vs. Windows. There are several characters that are used to represent end-of-line/carriage return. We will always used'\n' (newline) in this course. This is the UNIX/linux way. Please do not use '\m' or '\r' in this course, it won't match the output we are expecting on the homework submission server. In order to examine the provided code & sample output & your own output, you'll want to make sure you find a text viewer/editor that correctly displays newlines ('\n').

Some code/text editor options:

Emacs
VI/Vim
Textmate (commercial, MacOSX only)
E-texteditor (commercial, windows only)
Gedit
Programmer's Notepad (windows only)
notepad++ (windows only)

C++ IDEs (Integrated Development Environments)

Here are a few C++ development environments (similar to Visual Studio) that can be used with the gcc compilers:

Eclipse
http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
wxDev-C++
http://wxdsgn.sourceforge.net/
Code::Blocks
http://www.codeblocks.org/
NetBeans
http://www.netbeans.org/features/cpp/
Notes on getting Netbeans to work with Cygwin and g++
Anjuta
http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/